Modernly, usage of PCs (personal computers) is quite commonplace, yet still growing. Affordable hardware becomes faster and has more capabilities and capacities with each passing year. Application software to handle new tasks and system software to handle new devices continues to emerge.
A typical user may encounter new versions of software that is already deployed with both advantages and disadvantages as compared with the old. It is fair to say that as time passes a typical user deploys a computer of ever more capabilities and increasing amounts of software.
A perennial problem facing the typical computer user is the benefits (and financial cost) of adopting a new version of hardware or software (or a new application entirely) versus the benefit of staying with older product that one has learned to work well with. The factors that go into such a choice are complex (and beyond the present scope) but integrated software solutions raise additional concerns as they tend to limit the ability of different applications (or even different variants of the same application) to peacefully coexist. A common problem of this type might arise if one has, for example, a device driver for particular hardware designed to work only with Microsoft® Windows® XP™ OS (Operating System) and an application program designed to work only with Microsoft® Windows® Vista OS. No solution is entirely satisfactory and tradeoffs will have to be tolerated.
Another significant consideration for a typical user is the computer start-up time. In general the more always-resident software is tolerated the longer the computer will take to come from power-on to a ready for use condition. Even where multiple software, especially multiple OS, are inter-operable and useful (or at least peaceably co-exist) and provide sufficient performance they may still take too long to initialize and come to a ready state as compared with using a single OS. Computer start-up time can easily become irritating to a user who merely wishes to get on with the task at hand.
A further and growing problem is malware. Various improvements that target malware have been proposed but they too often rely on integrated solutions tied to a specific vendor, or worse, tied to a particular version of software from a particular vendor. This can make managing multiple software variants even more difficult. Moreover, such solutions can too often use an approach of “security by obscurity” which gives the user reduced control of his or her destiny and which is less suitable for use with open source products.